Embedded

  “Fuckin’-a, man,” I said in a defeated tone, “now we gotta get these damn things off of this guy.” I grabbed my Gerber all-purpose tool and went to work. I systematically tried to pry a knife under the cuffs, but because they were so tight, I only worsened the man’s pain. He yelled again. I peered into his eyes and in California English said, “Dude . . . shut up!”

  After five minutes of getting nowhere I came to an unfortunate conclusion: This Iraqi would have to endure some pain if he wanted to be free. The detained gasped, “Wallahhh” (Oh, God). As surgically as I possibly could, I got the knife blade under the flexi-cuff and ripped upward, cutting the plastic cuffs in half. The detainee cringed in agony but was relieved to have the cuffs removed. Espi reapplied the flexi-cuffs appropriately and we began the GPR tests.

  The GPR tests were overwhelmingly positive. These kids had been playing in daddy’s gun closet. The GPR was by no means a foolproof test, but given the circumstances, it was likely that these men had tried to kill me. After explaining to Captain Mawfood the GPR results, he ordered a group of jundi to take the detainees to the new U.S. COC, inside the security hut near the gate.

  Major Gaines had us gather around. “Gentlemen,” he said, “Nuts is taking out the next patrol, everyone involved in that group get ready. Jamal, you are the intel dude. Watch over these detainees and see if the Iraqis can get any information. Everyone else get some sleep.” Everyone understood the order and went their respective ways. I stayed behind, wishing I could get some sleep too.

  The makeshift guard shack that held the detainees was small, with a main room just big enough to hold a cot, a refrigerator, a bookshelf, and a side compartment room that acted as a sleeping post for the reserve guard on duty during Saddam’s reign. The Iraqis liked the idea of taking the detainees into the compartment room. I waited in the main room on the cot and took the opportunity to take off my heavy load and rest after a hectic twenty-four hours of combat.

  Thud, thud. A dense pounding sound came from the interrogation room. “Damn, I told them to play it cool with the detainees!” I said under my breath. I busted into the room and witnessed Martin, one of our terps, head butting the detainee and pounding him in the center of the back with his fist. “Martin, what are you doing man? You know if the detainee facility sees this all of our asses are gonna fry!” He looked up with a grin. “Jamal, this is how we always do it. Do you really want the Marines getting information from these guys? Gimme a break. The Marines suck at getting info! Plus the detention center never looks in the center of their back. The bruises in the areas where I am hitting these guys won’t show up for weeks. Relax!”

  I knew Martin. Any attempt to persuade him that torture was wrong would go nowhere. I addressed him anyway. “Listen dude, I don’t care if you rough this guy up a bit and need to scare him to get some information, but you can’t be pounding him in the back. That may be how you do it in Iraq and I understand Iraqis respond to this treatment, but I will be the one who goes to jail if they find out you guys beat the shit out of this guy and I knew about it.”

  Resgar, a Kurdish jundi and one of the few Iraqis I trusted, took me out of the room to explain the situation. “Jamal, I understand your concern. We do not want to hurt this young guy. We know he has a mother and a father who love him. But if we want usable intelligence, this kid needs to have a sense of fear and a sense that we are in complete control or he will not tell us anything.” Resgar explained that he had done interrogations in the Iraqi army and for the U.S. government in the Kurdish regions for ten years before he became a communications expert. I believed him. The guy knew what he was talking about. Who was I to disagree?

  I nodded in agreement and explained to Resgar that I agreed with his logic but felt for the young man’s safety. I came up with a compromise. I knew it would be impossible for me to shield the prisoners from the Iraqis; there were many of them and only one of me. Yet if I could convince the Iraqis this guy had given us all the information he knew, maybe the jundi would be less likely to be violent with him. “Listen Resgar, I have an idea, let me go in and talk to the prisoner.” Surprised, he responded, “You want to talk to him?” I said, “Yes, bring your electrocution prop and AK-47 into the room with me and follow my lead.”

  I barged into the detainee’s room and yelled at the Iraqis to leave. I took the young man’s blindfold off, looked him in the eyes, and said, “As salama aleikum.” He responded in kind and swore he did not have any information. We continued to talk. He was surprised to see an American speaking Arabic. Through our conversation I learned the young man was in graduate school and had a family in the neighborhood. He even attempted to speak English in order to gain favor with me. As we talked Resgar fiddled with a small battery with exposed wires in the corner. He acted as though he was preparing an electrocution device. It was the ultimate “good cop-bad cop” interrogation routine.

  I said to the detainee, “Listen man, I think you are an innocent man and I hope you have told me everything you know . . . but I am not sure. I am going to give you five minutes to tell me what you know. If you don’t I will let the Iraqis in here to do with you as they please. Please don’t let this happen. I need you to tell me everything you know—please.” The young man’s eyes widened and he screamed in English, “Mister, no! Please, mister!” He continued in Arabic, “Rah agullek kullshi, wallah!” (I will tell you everything, I swear to God!) I smiled and reengaged the frantic detainee. “Listen kid, I am going to leave the room for one minute to grab a glass of water for you. You look thirsty.”

  In the one minute I stepped out to get a glass of water for the young man, Resgar played the bad guy. He blindfolded the detainee and said to him, “You better fuckin’ tell the American everything you know.” Resgar charged his AK-47 and pointed it at the kid’s chest. The detainee screeched, “Jamal, he is going to kill me. Help!” I knew Resgar was trying to scare the shit out of the kid and had no plans to kill him. We understood each other’s tactics without explaining them to each other. I sprinted into the room and yelled, “Get out of here, Resgar. If this kid doesn’t speak, I’ll let you have at him, but wait your turn.” I took the blindfold off the detainee and handed him a glass of water. “Are you ready to talk?” He was ready. Tears gushed from the poor kid’s eyes.

  The detainee poured his guts out to me and Martin, whom I brought in for backup interpreter support. The guy told us everything he knew. He claimed to not be involved in the attack, knew those who were involved, and knew the location of an IED along Route Boardwalk one kilometer to the south of the WTF. His final piece of intelligence was a detailed description of one of the IED masterminds in Haditha who was responsible for numerous attacks.

  At the end of the kid’s information dump, Martin got more aggressive. “You are an insurgent,” he insisted. “Don’t lie. I will kill you.” Thud. Martin head butted the detainee again. I pushed Martin to the floor and ordered him out of the room immediately. We were done at this point. I was willing to play mind games with the detainees, but my moral compass would not allow Martin to beat him senseless.

  Dealing with the issue of torture for the first time in a real scenario made me think critically. I used to be in the “all torture is bad” camp, until I realized it would affect my survival. The issue is more complicated than simply saying torture is bad. This view is unrealistic and gets people killed. The argument I hate most is when people say torture is bad because there is a set standard of “ethics” in war. Wait a minute. War, at its heart, is about killing people until they agree with your viewpoint. Each side always has a different view of what is ethical and each side always thinks the other side is completely wrong.

  To Iraqis torture techniques are a common sense approach to getting information. Iraqis feel that with torture they can ensure the prisoner will tell them everything they know and everything they want to hear. The positive aspect of this approach is you know you have exhausted the detainee’s information; however, the negative side to this approach (
and an argument Americans frequently cite) is that the interrogator now has to disentangle the true information from the information that the prisoner gave because he wanted to hear it. The Iraqis believe that getting information is the hard part and disentangling it is easy. For Iraqis it logically follows that torture makes sense.

  Before we deployed our MiTT had received no guidance or training on what to do in a situation in which the jundi wanted to torture a detainee. My approach was to let Iraqis do what they needed to do while explaining to them that beating people and torturing them may only lead to false information. This was simple idealism. The reality was that no matter how much wasta I attained, I would never change thousands of years of history and culture. Torture, in some form or another, is part of Iraq. Those who succeed in Iraq learn to deal with Iraqi culture; those who fail in Iraq try to change Iraqi culture. I wish officials in the highest levels of our government would realize this.

  In this particular detainee case, it seemed like the Iraqi’s limited torture techniques worked, as we received outstanding information. We tried to get exact information, but reading maps is not a common skill in Iraq. Instead, the detainees gave us directions along the lines of “Go to the Hajji Mosque and turn a right at Abdul Azziz’s house. Once you reach his place, head to the place where we play soccer. This is where the IED is.” In the end the directions we received from the detainees were almost worthless. So instead we stopped by local homes to ask how to get to certain landmarks that they had mentioned.

  Asking for directions from the locals ended up being fruitful. We had the chance to chat with the townspeople, hear their concerns, and learn about the local area. The stunning thing is that nearly every person in the village was either related to (or knew of ) the detainees we had captured. How word of their detention traveled so fast is a mystery.

  After a sluggish two-kilometer move south, we made it to the Hajji Mosque. Finding a mosque is normally an easy task: look for the large minaret. However, the Hajji Mosque was unique, because a 500-pound MK-82 JDAM (joint direct attack munition) had destroyed the minaret during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The evidence that a mosque had ever existed was the rubble of the minaret and a village full of disenfranchised locals.

  “As salama aleikum,” I said to a heavyset older woman cleaning off her porch with the help of her kids. The women approached me to chat. I asked her if she was familiar with the name of the detainee. She went into a tizzy. “Where is my son? What have you done with him? He is a good boy, a college student, he would not hurt a flower! Please, tell me he is okay!” I explained to the woman, “Your son is in good hands and we are ensuring the Iraqi soldiers do not kill or harm him. If your son is innocent he will be returned to you within seventy-two hours.”

  The crying mother made me human again. This mother, who was as concerned about her son as my mom would be if I were in the same situation, touched me. She cried the same tears, asked the same questions, and professed the greatness and innocence of her child. I hoped she was right and her son was innocent. I am also thankful that I did not let the jundi go apeshit on her son. I would have felt like a real jerk if I told the woman her son was doing dandy but at the same time had watched the jundi beat him or electrocute him.

  I heard a refined English accent come from a doorway. “Hello, what is your name?” A young, clean-cut man came out to see what was happening on the porch. “I am Jamal,” I responded in Arabic. “I was explaining to your mother that we have detained your brother.” He seemed content with this answer. “I am not worried. I know you will treat him in a fair manner. I work for a man named Scott. He is a Marine.” The man’s comments astonished me. I realized that this guy must be a Marine human intelligence source that provided valuable intelligence to the Marines. This was one family we didn’t want to screw over.

  “Sir, we gotta head south,” Sergeant Kelley said. I bid farewell to the mother and told her that God would take care of her son. She released her death grip from my arm, wished me good luck, and we continued to press south to the suspected IED site. Twenty minutes later we reached the vicinity of the potential IED sites. We asked the locals if they had seen any activity in the area in order to pinpoint where it was located. We stopped by the nearest house on the other side of a wadi (dried riverbed).

  Foliage surrounded the home. This house belonged to the second detainee we had captured—the one whose wrist bled from the flexi-cuffs. I could not believe it. Amazingly, out of the hundreds of shanty homes to choose in the area, we happened to pick the two that were the homes of the detainees.

  The scene at this home was similar to that at the last one. The mother was frantic and wanted to know that her son was okay. The father, a former military man, was the only voice of reason present. After explaining the circumstances of his son’s detention, he understood our situation and requested that we would take care of his son in a respectable manner. He followed up on the intelligence we had received from his son and elaborated on where he thought the insurgents had placed the IED.

  We made our way through the thick foliage that surrounded the man’s house. The man pointed to an open area and said, “That is where the insurgents have been recently.” Kelley asked the Iraqi squad leader to gather some jundi-bots (Marine term for Iraqi soldiers who check potential unexploded ordnance and suspected IED sites) to assess the situation. While it seems insensitive to send a jundi to check on explosives, it makes more sense that a jundi rather than a Marine do this duty.

  The two jundi searched around the suspected IED location for thirty minutes. They kicked trash piles, picked up metal fragments, and rummaged around in the dirt. This seemed to be a dry hole and we needed to move. We reformed the patrol and moved east across Boardwalk into the palm groves. We still needed to cover two and a half kilometers of ground to get back to the WTF. The last thing we wanted was to be in the palm groves in complete darkness—we had learned our lesson.

  We arrived at the WTF with a mere glimpse of moonlight left. I had not slept in twenty-four hours, and it was time to hit the rack.

  Special Forces Join in the Fun

  I decided to convince Hussein, the Iraqi squad leader, to add a layer of deception on our next patrol. I thought our patrolling patterns were getting routine and we needed to change things if we wanted to keep the insurgents on their toes. We decided that for this patrol we would head south into the village as we typically did but would cut the patrol short and head north back to the WTF as it was getting dark. This would convince the locals we were done patrolling for the day. Once we arrived at the back entrance of the WTF, which was concealed by a small wadi, instead of calling it quits for the night, we would sneak out the western side of the WTF and make our way to an observation point (OP) five hundred meters north of the WTF on a barren hill that overlooked Boardwalk. The intent of the deception was to trick the insurgents into thinking our patrolling efforts were finished for the night and that they could freely conduct IED activities for a few hours before we sent out the early morning patrol.

  Hussein agreed on our proposed plan. He decided to claim the deception tactic as his own idea and explained it to the jundi in the squad. I had no problem with him stealing my intellectual property; this is how the adviser gig is supposed to work. The jundi were excited.

  We pushed south into the village area near the WTF at 1800. The sun would set in the next two hours. We patrolled though the village. Everything seemed peaceful and tranquil—something had to be wrong. Even so, we moved north toward the WTF, walking across the tallest hill in the village to ensure we were seen by all the townspeople. We reached the wadi west of the WTF and disappeared inside, covering our movement to the townspeople and insurgents who were certainly tracking our movements. I radioed our situation to Major Gaines. “Sir, we are at the back gate, over.” Gaines responded, “Jamal, I got something for you. The Special Forces showed up and they want to send two of their snipers to the OP with you and the jundi. I’m sure you’d agree these gu
ys are better marksmen than the jundi anyway, over.” I confirmed. “Roger, Sir. Send them our way; we have to wait here in the wadi until it gets completely dark anyway. Out.”

  The thought of working with the Special Forces snipers was appealing. While the Hollywood appeal of Special Forces personnel had lessened since I had been working with them, I still thought it might be cool to have Special Forces snipers on our patrol. In fact, I knew this mission would be amazing. I would be the leading tactical adviser on a foreign military patrol in a war zone, speaking a foreign language and fighting alongside Iraqi soldiers as an equal. On top of that we were going to clandestinely move to a hill in the desert overlooking Route Boardwalk under the cover of darkness and hunt insurgents with help from a couple of Green Beret snipers. If this is not living the adventure, what is? I wondered.

  The Special Forces snipers showed up at the west gate of the WTF. I sat them down with Hussein and had Hussein explain his plan to occupy the OP. It was a relief to work with the Special Forces. I knew I did not have to explain to the snipers why I was letting the Iraqis lead the show. They understand more than anyone that the role of being a military adviser is to advise, teach, and support—not to command.

  Once the plan was in place we moved quickly and quietly into the desert under the cover of darkness. I felt a sense of peace in the silence. The footsteps of warriors walking in the desert broke the quietness. The jundi were not as graceful as I had hoped. On our way to the assembly area I counted five loud crashes caused by jundi who tripped in ditches and small holes in the barren landscape. Despite the racket we continued to push forward without notice. Route Boardwalk was a good six hundred meters away. If anyone had heard our commotion, the people would write it off as feral dogs thrashing around in the open desert.